With the new-look MAC is taking shape, Terry Grimley is given a glimpse of what’s to come.

If you were going to start from scratch to design a new arts centre in the wonderful landscape setting of Cannon Hill Park, you might dream of something like the Norwegian wood of Snøhetta’s art museum in Lillehammar, or the pure airy white of any of Richard Meier’s cultural buildings.

Unfortunately the £14.8 million rebuild of the Midlands Arts Centre, due to open next year, did not start with a cleared site but with a higgledy-piggledy, 40-year growth of mainly undistinguished buildings, now run-down, with a confusing muddle of levels, no lifts and limited disabled access.

This redevelopment by MAC in partnership with the city-based South Asian arts organisation Sampad spent ten years on the drawing board in a saga of funding setbacks and budget cuts.

The main challenge for concept architects Branson Coates, who handed over to Chetwood Architects two years ago, was to unpick the chaos caused by the incremental growth of the complex, opening up larger and more coherent circulation areas and bringing the building up to date with modern standards of accessibility.

In terms of facilities, the main new features are a spacious new art gallery – the centre’s first custom-designed space for displaying visual art – and a new performance studio housed in a former roof void.

The exterior design might have looked disappointingly blocky in the visuals published before work began, but you might still be shocked to discover that the camouflage-painted cladding is actually corrugated iron. I know I was.

Fortunately, things cheer up considerably once you step inside. There will be a new entrance, reached by a new bridge across the River Rea which has still to be installed, which will line up with the boulevard through the neighbouring Edgbaston Mill development.

This brings you into the building at a point which previously would have been just behind the box office, which remains more or less in the same place but is turned to face the other way. The entrance opens out into a greatly expanded and heightened foyer, which is now all on one level. The retained Hexagon building is fully incorporated into the interior, with a bridge at first floor level connecting it to the theatre foyer, which is now at this higher level.

A much larger café bar is located in what was previously the entrance area (although the existing bar will also be retained), and two new function rooms occupy the space which used to be the Foyle House Gallery.

The theatre, which looks astonishingly large with the seating and backstage stripped out, will have its previous inflexible cinema-style seating replaced by seating on bleachers, with capacity increased slightly to 220.

“Most of the money being spent on the theatre is going into re-servicing it,” says MAC’s director Dorothy Wilson. “The cinema is not changing at all, but it’s being completely refurbished on insurance after it was flooded last year.”

But the most dramatic addition is the new gallery. Impressively generous in height, it is only about 20 per cent smaller than the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre. After many years of promoting a lively visual arts programme largely using display spaces in corridors and the bar (and in the Cotton Gallery, which despite its inflexibility served MAC well considering that it was converted from subterranean toilets), this promises to lift MAC’s profile into a different league.

“We haven’t gone for a gallery dividing system as part of the base build because we want to find out how to do it,” Dorothy Wilson says. “We will establish whether we make our own system or have a bespoke system. But we have deliberately designed the gallery in terms of where the doors are, so that you can divide it into three gallery spaces.”

The other significant addition is the performance studio, which as well as providing valuable rehearsal space will have bleacher seating for up to 140 people for informal performances.

The external courtyard, a popular focal point for families in the summer, will be remodelled to give a more open aspect to the park. For the first time there are lifts in the building, plus more toilets.

MAC is going to feel like a bigger venue, with the opened-out spaces replacing the almost domestic scale that seems to have been a particular characteristic of its early years. It feels like a move towards something more comparable with Warwick Arts Centre – a comparison which will become more meaningful if axed plans for a new 500-seat theatre on the current site of the underused amphitheatre are reinstated in a future phase.

But unlike WAC this is a hands-on arts centre serving the local community, and the various art and music studios remain an integral part of the mix.

As yet there is no formal reopening date, but 2010 will be the year.

* WEB: You can see a four-minute video of the new building at www.macarts.co.uk. MAC still needs to raise £329,000 for the project and welcomes contributions. See the website for more details.